Courses Taught Category
Friday, October 30th, 2009
This course is a required advanced writing class for some majors at Illinois State University. It also fulfills a requirement for a minor in writing. As of Fall 2009, I have taught this class once.
semesters & syllabi
description
I taught English 246 as an Audio Essay class, in the spirit of radio stories and documentaries like those heard on This American Life. We started by making playlists of favorite songs to introduce each other through musical choices (in order to discuss the rhetoric of music and other forms of audio). We then worked on audio poems for Poetry Radio on WGLT (the local NPR station), moved onto 5-7 minute audio documentary-like stories, and concluded with This I Believe reflections about the class and learning experience.
teaching innovations
- I installed Moodle, an open-source content-management system, for the first time on my personal server for students to use as a place to hold online discussions and to upload their audio files. I used about half the features in Moodle, students preferred it to Blackboard/WebCT, and so I may use it again, although the freely available ning platform, which was not available at the time, may be easier.
- This semester was the first time I used a blog platform for an entire syllabus. All schedules, policies, readings, resource links, and class news was posted to the class blog, which students seemed to like. (Still, however, I did not have students using their own blog; there wasn’t a purpose for that kind of blog-portfolio for this class.)
teaching challenge
A challenge I faced in teaching this course had to do with the available hardware in my classroom. Because this course isn’t always taught in a computer lab, I had originally been assigned a “dumb” classroom, which is what my field calls a classroom with no technology, as opposed to a “smart” classroom, a common term in instructional technology that refers to a classroom with at least a teacher’s computer station and projection equipment. So I switched into a computer classroom with 27 older stations and furniture that was literally falling apart. (Given that the building was currently undergoing life-safety renovations and this particular classroom was being phased out for the following year, I was happy to have it.) Although the machines did not have CD burners, which would normally be a must for an audio essay class, we made do. (It turns out that despite students’ lack of technical production in multimodal composition, they know how to burn CDs on their home computers. :) However, I had another challenge with this room, which was both technological and ideological: It was built to house a large seminar instead of a smaller-sectioned writing class, but the room layout was too long and narrow to conduct discussions. Each of the 3 classes assigned to that room that last semester of its existence had less than 22 students, so (with permission) I removed 5 computer stations and the worst of the broken desks, which made the room feel more cozy and condusive to discussion.
accompanying materials
Tags: new prep, teaching challenge, teaching innovation, undergraduate
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Friday, October 30th, 2009
Multimodal Composition is an upper-division writing elective for all majors at Illinois State University. As of Fall 2009, I have taught this course four times.
semesters & syllabi
- Fall 2007 (as English 289.22: Multimedia Writing Workshop): 18 students
- Fall 2008 (hereafter as English 239: Multimodal Composition): 12 students
- Spring 2009: 9 students (7 undergraduates & 2 graduate students, as independent studies)
- Fall 2009: 14 students (11 undergraduates & 3 graduate students, as independent studies)
description
Started as English 289.33: Multimedia Writing Workshop. I wrote the course proposal to turn it into a permanent class. During Fall 2007, I taught the course similarly to how I taught English 3040: Perspectives in Writing & Rhetoric the previous year as a faculty member at Utah State University; its topic was an open-assignment video course where students progressed from smaller, monomodal exercises to 5-minute multimodal videos of various genres. I didn’t like the organization for the course (as described in my teaching development plan under Teaching), so I changed the syllabus the next fall. For Fall 08, Spring 09, and Fall 09, the course focused on having students compose digital media scholarship for a peer-reviewed publication in English Studies. The publication venue changed for different semesters, as students responded to real calls for papers in the field of digital writing studies.
teaching innovations
- Fall 2007, I implemented a teaching innovation of showcasing the student’s work at the local, historic cinema. I was nominated for the department’s innovative teaching award for this effort, although it turned out I was ineligible because I had not been at ISU long enough to meet the award criteria of two years.
- Fall 2008 came a different innovation as I changed the syllabus — having students compose texts for peer-reviewed publications provided them with the elusive “authentic audience” while giving them a specific rhetorical situation in which to work. Also innovative this semester was taking as many of these students who could go to a national conference about multimodal composition. From this event, which they filmed, they built several digital media projects and proposed their inclusion into the digital conference proceedings. Their proposals were accepted, and as of Fall 2009, I am working with one student from that class to revise the student projects for publication.
accompanying materials
see also
Tags: new course, new prep, service-learning, SoTL, undergraduate, undergraduate research
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Friday, October 30th, 2009
This graduate course at Illinois State University is required for all teaching assistants assigned to English 101 or 101.10, the first-year writing course. It is a theoretical course about the teaching of writing.
semesters & syllabi
- Fall 2008 (2 sections; 12 Masters & PhD students enrolled in my section)
- Fall 2009 (2 sections; 10 Masters & PhD students enrolled in my section)
description
The first time I taught this required course, I created a syllabus that addressed a different composition pedagogy each week, building from historical options (e.g., current-traditional, expressivist, process, etc.) to more recent additions to the field (e.g., feminist, critical, multimodal, etc.). I chose not to use the traditional anthology for this class because it lacked any readings about more current theories, especially on visual rhetoric, multimodality, or teaching with technology, so I added readings relevant to those topics to each week, as appropriate. (I did this because students teach in computer-assisted classrooms and otherwise they wouldn’t get any theory on teaching in those spaces.) In addition to the theoretical/historical focus, students studied the professional aspects of being a rhetoric and composition scholar, to give them a look at how different fields (since only two or three of the 12 students had a rhet/comp emphasis) enact their professional goals. Students reviewed journals and textbooks, did brief ethnographies on a blog or conference, led class discussions, created short videos about their or others’ writing processes, and drafted teaching philosophies. I was happy with the course, but the evaluations showed otherwise. I realized, after the fact, the level of buy-in needed from students in a required course outside their field. (Apparently, according to others who have taught this course, such reactions to 402 are not unusual.)
The second time I taught this required course, we had hired a new Writing Program Administrator, and she and I decided to write a shared syllabus. It was completely different than my previous syllabus, with a focus on genre studies, which helped us rethink the goals of ISU’s writing program. The assignments were shared across the two sections and included discussions on a shared ning (online learning space with characteristics of a social networking space); ethnographies of others’ writing classes to study the physical, material, and ideological ways writing is taught; group and individual manifestos about ways to change the current writing program practices at ISU; short praxis-based articles for possible publication in one of two scholarly venues; and proposals (based on manifestos) for enacting change in the ISU writing program.
teaching challenge
- My evaluations for the Fall 2008 semester were not as good as I am used to, and many of the students commented that the homework I assigned seemed more like busy work to them, although I had discussed at length during several classes how that work was professional development and would help them see the kinds of scholarship rhetoric and composition scholars often undertake. For the Fall 2009 class, the new Writing Program Administrator (Joyce Walker) and I are team-teaching our sections with a new syllabus and new assignments that we hope will reinvigorate the writing program at ISU. Compared to last year, overall there are less assignments that focus on professionalization in rhetoric and composition since we decided that the point of 402 should be about the teaching of writing, broadly construed, and not just how rhet/comp scholars engage with the teaching of writing. We did, however, keep some assignments that were similar to those I assigned last year, such as the short articles, but these assignments are pitched as performances of pedagogical scholarship, which is appropriate for all students in our program, rather than on service to the field.
- In Fall 2009, the only challenge that this class has faced is an issue of classroom space. The 3-hour course was originally split between two classrooms (50 minutes in the seminar room, two hours in the computer lab), which did not work with the open discussion style of this class. After looking around, Tara Reeser (Publications Unit Director) offered us the Publications Unit lab, which has suited us extremely well (even though it displaces Tara from her office because of its location to the lab). It doesn’t have enough computers for all my students this semester, but it does have excellent wireless access, which Stevenson (where we normally meet) does not, so some students bring their laptops. The challenge here is recognizing that English studies courses need technologically rich spaces in most cases, and that we need more of these spaces on campus. I hope to work with the department’s Associate Chair to resolve this issue in the coming years.
teaching innovation
The Fall 2009 semester was the first time I’ve co-taught a course (even though we each have our own section that meets at different times). Dr. Joyce Walker and I co-created the syllabus, readings, and assignments, and we’ve visited each others’ classes to meet the students and discuss assignment options with them. This is also the first time I’ve used a ning in a class, with both sections sharing the same class syllabus/blog and ning so that they can “meet” each other virtually throughout the week and share ideas across sections. It has worked seamlessly because both Joyce and I have administrative control in the blog and ning, so we add users ourself. (This would be difficult, if not impossible, in Blackboard, while the ning allows us the same, if not better, features and usability. Plus, using the ning and blog (both of which are open-access and free) allow us to show students technologies that they can use in their own teaching.
accompanying materials
Tags: graduate, new prep, teaching challenge, teaching innovation
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Friday, October 30th, 2009
This course is an elective for masters and PhD students in the English Department at Illinois State University.
semesters & syllabi
description
This course was an introduction to the intersections of textual production and consumption, modes of communication (i.e., visual, linguistic, aural, gestural, spatial), and media within English studies since the advent of the World Wide Web. The subtitle for the course was “What is ‘new media’ in an English department?” We studied the eras of digital, literary hypertext (1989–1994), hypermedia (1994–1999), and new media (2000–present), with some attention paid to the impact of Web 2.0 on these texts (2006–present). We read primary texts (i.e., Joyce’s afternoon: a story and Jackson’s Patchwork Girl) that helped introduce students to these genres. We also read theoretical texts (literary theory, computer science, rhetoric, design, cinema studies, etc.) such as Landow’s Hypertext 3.0, Hayles’ Writing Machines, and Manovich’s The Language of New Media. Students produced final projects that embodied/enacted these theories.
teaching challenge
467 was the first graduate-only class I had taught at ISU, so I wrote the syllabus trying to appeal to the broad range of English studies backgrounds that students might bring to class. Because, I suspect, of the word technology in the class title and my newness on campus (students didn’t know me or my research yet), the course enrolled mostly Masters students studying technical communication. In addition, three students from the Arts Technology masters program enrolled. Because of the broad range of backgrounds, I learned to explain the theoretical and e-literary works in more detail than I would have normally (leading to a bit more lecture than discussion, which is not my preferred method for graduate classes), but this was a great learning experience for me in understanding the range of students we teach at ISU and in enacting a pedagogy useful for an English studies model.
accompanying materials
Tags: graduate, new prep
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Friday, October 30th, 2009
Visible Rhetoric, at Illinois State University, is part of a set of upper-level, required electives (i.e., choose 2 of 3) for the English department’s undergraduate sequence in publishing studies and track in technical writing. As a 300-level class, it is also open to masters and PhD students who want to take a course that is part theory, part hands-on. Students learn theories of visual rhetoric (i.e., typefaces, color, materiality of a document) and learn to apply those theories to print documents using Adobe InDesign (among other programs). As of Fall 2009, I have taught this course once.
semesters & syllabi
- Fall 2007 (paper syllabus not currently available; lost in a hard-drive crash)
- Enrollment: 18 students (16 undergraduates, 1 Masters, 1 PhD student)
description
In my first semester at Illinois State, I taught English 350, modeling it on previous publications classes I taught, with the modification that this class didn’t need to focus on pre-press issues because the intro course in the publishing sequence does that. Students started by focusing on how the design of written text, including use of fonts, makes meaning for audiences/readers and designing small documents (flyers) in Microsoft Word. Then transferring that knowledge to larger projects and more complicated software programs (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop). Projects included collateral material (résumés, business cards, letterhead) and final projects of their choosing, which included chapbooks, children’s books, sets of print advertising material, etc.
teaching challenge
The challenge for me was two-fold: figuring out how to adapt a service-learning syllabus focusing on a single class project (i.e., a literary magazine) to individual projects, and accommodating learning needs at the undergraduate through PhD-level in one class. I didn’t feel very successful in doing this, and although I love teaching print design and visual rhetoric, I asked to be taken off the rotation for this course until I could figure out a better strategy. Another faculty member is teaching that course regularly now (and with seeming great success), so if I need to teach it again, I will sit in on her class to borrow some of her teaching strategies. Despite my hesitancy about the way I taught this class, I won a Sigma Tau Delta Teaching Award after undergraduates in that class nominated me.
accompanying materials
see also
Tags: graduate, new prep, teaching award, teaching challenge, undergraduate
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Saturday, October 28th, 2006
This course, targeted at graduating seniors in the Professional Writing major at Utah State University, uses a common syllabus designed to have students gain an understanding of the technical writing job market as well as to produce materials they can use in job interviews (such as a résumé, cover letter, and print and web portfolios).
SPRING 2006 summary
This was the first time I taught Capstone, and I adapted a weekly schedule based on the common syllabus that USU professional writing faculty members Kelli Cargile Cook, Charlotte Thralls, and Mark Zachry produced in the early 2000s.
- sections taught in department this term: 1
- number of students enrolled: 13
teaching innovations
I made one major change to the standard syllabus for this class, and that was to assign the capstone students to work two hours in the departmental computer lab. I instituted this pilot program to see whether those in their final year of school—who knew the lab and its software best—would make ideal lab consultants. However, the students misinterpreted my reasons for wanting them to work in the lab and assumed that it was so that the lab didn’t need to have to pay consultants. (I was Acting Lab Director at the time, so this class assignment was received as my trying to get the students to work for free.) Thus, the majority of the students complained that the experience was a waste of their time. Sadly, they didn’t take advantage of the many professional development opportunities I knew this work would provide for them, and my suggestions on how they might make the situation more useful for themselves remained unused. I’m still considering what I might learn from this situation that will be of use the next time I think about implementing professional development and service learning into my course goals.
teaching challenge
In addition to the above challenges to my innovation, this course proved to be difficult for me not because of subject matter (professionalization, which is right up my research alley) but because I intervened in an incident involving one of the students overstepping her boundaries in the departmental lab prior to the semester starting. A lab consultant had to call the campus police, and as Acting Lab Director, I revoked her privileges. However, she had to take my course, so we agreed on terms of proceeding before the semester. In the end, her behavior did not improve and class was disrupted, evidenced by a downward trend in my teaching evaluations for that class. Should this unique situation happen again, I believe the solution would be to work with advisers and find alternate class arrangements for the student.
narrative evaluations
- The interview process was fun and very helpful. Cheryl gave some good stories and examples from her life that helped us see what the real world is like.
- I have two great portfolios now! I’m ready to get a job, or at least apply for one, and I wasn’t before this class.
- Cheryl was interested in what the students want to do with their future. She has good networking and interviewing examples to share.
- Dr. Ball is a talented designer and she has enthusiasm for design and online teaching. She has contemporary insights into the job market and the skills required to get hired and be a competitive tech writer. Dr. Ball is great at what she does.
- I liked the immediacy of our concerns, the reality and importance of everything we’ve been learning at university. Cheryl’s attitude of professionalism without too much idealism/stuffiness was nice.
- She has a weird idea of what a good design is and those that didn’t use pink flamingos had a poor design even if it refleted us. We should be able to choose what works for us, otherwise she needs to design portfolios for each student so that we do exactly what she wants.
- Good things: Cheryl was happy. She has energy. She fed us poundcake. Once. We got the recipe. We built portfolios. This is good.
accompanying materials
Tags: new prep, professional development, service-learning, teaching challenge, undergraduate
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Saturday, October 28th, 2006
The purpose of this course at Utah State University was to introduce professional/technical writing majors to pre-press and printing processes for large-scale print documents. We covered printing terminology, color types, production management techniques, image manipulation for print documents, and pre-press guidelines. Editing and working with clients as well as establishing baseline differences between print and web publications was also part of the course goals.
SPRING 2005 summary
The majority of this class was spent designing the campus literary magazine, Scribendi, a project that provided many collaborative opportunities for students, which I describe in detail below.
- sections taught in department this term: 1
- number of students enrolled: 19
teaching innovations
This class was a new prep for me at Utah State. I implemented an idea I used for a similar class at a previous school—having students re/design the campus literary magazine. The purpose of this assignment is to give students a real-world example of preparing a large-scale document for a printing press (including real-world deadlines, budgets, and clients). The past editors of Scribendi, the literary magazine at USU, were thrilled to have students work on updating the design. (Past editors were volunteer English department staff and faculty members assigned to oversee the creative writing contest, winners of which were published in the magazine.)
In class, the students worked in small groups to complete the redesign:
- four groups worked on the main content and design (after a collaborative effort on making a template). Each group consisted of a book designer, a graphic designer, and an editor, and the three members worked collectively on one signature (16-page spread) of the magazine;
- a fifth group was responsible for the design template that every group used, the cover, table of contents, and other front- and backmatter;
- a sixth group was the marketing and budget team. They were responsible for raising money (which they elected to do rather than stick with the current budget, even though I informed them that it was not a part of the class) and for writing promotional materials.
The students worked with several clients including the new creative writing contest director, Anne Shifrer, to collect the winning entries; choose how many would fit in the pages we had the budget for; edit the entries and insert them into the template in an appropriate sequence based on thematic issues; collected graphics from artists on campus and matched the graphics to specific texts; and prepared the entire publication for printing. In addition, they raised a significant amount of money (nearly $1,500 in a month) so that they could publish 1,000 copies on a professional press instead of photocopying 100 for departmental use, as had been done in past years.
Because students had a limited budget for printing, which meant a limited number of pages they could print, they decided (with my guidance) to excerpt several large stories and place all winners in their entirety on an accompanying website. Thus, students also had the chance to design the publication for a second medium. The website is linked at the bottom of this post.
Finally, students presented fresh-off-the-press copies of Scribendi to the campus at the annual Student Showcase for undergraduate research. They created a poster to outline their hands-on research activities and distributed nearly 700 copies that week to stakeholders and students around the campus and the community. (The rest of the copies were kept to include in the students’ portfolios and for departmental recruiting efforts.)
narrative evaluations
- “Cheryl has an incredible knack for helping students take charge of their learning. She has such a personable nature that students feel elevated to her level. Cheryl is a great professor, and a mentor that keeps me striving to impress! 10 out of 10.”
- “I thought that the objectives were very clear and we always knew what was expected of us. I also thought the expectations of us were high, which helped us to learn more. I am glad that I had the opportunity to take this class from Cheryl Ball. I thought she was a very good teacher.”
- “Cheryl Rocks! She really pushes for quality and her attitude is positive. She doesn’t take b.s. from anyone and she’s extremely knowledgable about technology that we’re suposed to learn. I appreciate that…. She goes the extra mile.”
- “I felt that the literary magazine redesign was a very good teaching process for publication production. I enjoyed learning the process of publishing an actual magazine. Cheryl, I appreciate the knowledge that you shared with us. I am glad to have a professor that has such a great knowledge of what we are doing, particularly about making a publication as a student [refering to my experiences making litmags when I was a student]. Thank you, Cheryl. You rock! And we learned a lot about responsibility.”
- “I never knew publication production could be so exciting.”
accompanying materials
Tags: new prep, service-learning, SoTL, undergraduate, undergraduate research
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Saturday, October 28th, 2006
The 3040 class is a general-education (depth), upper-division writing class at Utah State University. (I usually refer to it as an advanced composition class.) Non-English-majors typically enroll, and the theme changes depending on the faculty member who teaches it.
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Fall 2004 summary
Fall 2004 was the first time that I taught English 3040. The focus was on multimodal composition, and the students created websites that demonstrated their rhetorical understanding of writing and design. Due to technological and scheduling constraints, however, the students were aggravated by their inability to complete what I was supposed to be teaching: video-editing, which I had been asked to teach but the lab was not capable of handing. This class was a huge teaching challenge for me, and I rewrote the syllabus several times upon discovery of each technological hindrance. I quickly learned what the lab could accommodate and worked closely with the systems administrator to update the hardware that I would need to teach this class in future semesters.
- sections taught in department this term: 1
- number of students enrolled: 25
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Spring 2005 summary
This course went much better than the Fall 2004 version. I changed the syllabus to accommodate the technological resources the department had, and the focus was on literary hypertexts. The course objectives — which included having students read about, analyze, and produce creative, digital texts — were spelled out for them from the beginning of the term. We were able to produce new media videos as a final project.
- sections taught in department this term: 2 (mine & ‘medical writing’ which is technically offered through the Biology department, although they use our course number)
- number of students enrolled: 18
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Summer 2005 summary
I taught this version of the class as a 5-day workshop (which at Utah State counted as a full, 3-credit class). I truncated the syllabus dramatically to overview all history and theory about electronic literature in the first day and had students working on video poems by the beginning of the second day. They had three days to complete all progress on the videos, which they presented to each other and to department colleagues in an open house on Friday morning.
- number of students enrolled: 18
- no other sections
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Fall 2006 summary
This is the third time I taught this course (in a full semester), although it was still a new prep because I kept changing the theme and major projects as the lab gathered more resources. The focus for Fall 2006 was on digital narratives. Students read about and produced a range of digital, narrative texts including iMixes, voiceovers, vogs, video or audio documentaries, and a final project of their choice. The assignments focus on how to rhetorically choose media that will meet the purpose and audience expectations of a given genre (or mixed-genre text).
- sections taught in department this term: 2 (mine & ‘medical writing’, offered through the Biology Department)
- number of students enrolled: 17
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teaching innovations
By the time I taught this class for the second time, I was able to procure [through the department and the Vice President of Research] digital video cameras for the students to use as well as hardware updates to accommodate digital video-editing in the English department computer lab. Thus, I was able to have students complete the final assignment of a new media video poem. (The assignment is included in the accompanying materials.)
For the Fall 2006 class on digital narratives, I used blogs for the first time in my teaching as a way for students to explore public/private issues when composing narratives and also as a way for them to communicate mid-week since the class meets once a week. A single blog was used for both this undergraduate class and my graduate class on multimodal composition, so that students could play with issues of audience in their comments. (The students themselves didn’t have blogs; an innovation I didn’t pick up for another two years.)
narrative evaluations
- “I didn’t know what to expect, but I have really learned a lot from being here. My computer literacy, which was very low, grew a lot. I like how you have style and personality but still have the respeect because you know how to do it all.”
- “The learning about rhetoric was subtle and fun!”
- “Overall it was a fun class and was unexpectedly helpful with other classes and presentations. I liked learning about the 13 terms [from the ix: visual exercises CD, which we looked at in class] and how they relate to different kinds of communication. It’s cool to apply some of those terms to other things I’m doing in school. Thanks”
- “I love Cheryl…her outlook and assignments were great.”
- “Dr. Ball did really well in presenting the design considerations from the CD, and in teaching the class how to create web pages in Dreamweaver.”
- “I am very satisfied that the university hired Cheryl Ball to teach this new style of English course. I was able to learn more applicable communication skills in this class than I did in all of my years in AP/Honors English. Great job!”
- “Your teaching style really engages the class and makes it a fun class environment. I particularly liked the level of class discussion which you allowed. This really facilitated learning the subject matter.”
- “It was the most interesting English class I’ve ever taken. You got me looking at writing and the formats of my papers in a whole new way.”
- “Cheryl was very knowledgable and enthusiastic. It is a hands-on course that she actually gave us time to put our hands on.”
- “I really liked the way the class was more of a discussion. It helped me feel a part. I also thought the assignments were both educational and fun.”
- “It was good to learn new ways of looking at all things.”
- “She has studied this a long time and is good at it. She assigns the right amount of workload for the class. I liked discussing the readings; it’s more helpful than just taking a quiz on them.”
accompanying materials
see also
Tags: new prep, SoTL, teaching challenge, undergraduate
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Saturday, October 28th, 2006
English 3410 is one of two gateway classes into the Professional Writing Major in the English Department at Utah State University. The focus of the class is on rhetorical design skills in relation to image manipulation software and web design editors. Students are tasked with designing a web-based portfolio of their work, on which they build until they take the Capstone class as seniors. Students are required to earn a B- or better to enter the major. I taught this class twice: Fall 2004 and Fall 2005.
FALL 2004 summary
This class was a new prep since I was a new faculty member at the time. The students encountered problems with the technology because we had limited numbers of software licenses for the first half of the term, which made demo-ing the programs (Adobe and Macromedia Suites) in class and having students complete homework outside of class very difficult. Mid-term we got more licenses, which significantly helped the students’ learning and engagement in the class. Besides software, the students encountered many hardware problems because I was (unknowingly, at the time) asking them to design and save documents that the hardware couldn’t handle. As a class we discovered these problems and came up with some work-arounds, but the students were generally aggravated at the lack of technological resources.
- sections taught in department this term: 1
- number of students enrolled: 21*
*(I accidentally over-enrolled the class, which caused computer-access issues that we accommodated by having the extra student use the instructor’s computer workstation.)
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FALL 2005 summary
Fall 2005 was the second time I taught this course, and much of the technological problems encountered the first time I taught it were ameliorated. In addition to the web-portfolio project, I instituted several new assignments for this class, which I discuss below.
- sections taught in department this term: 1
- number of students enrolled: 17
teaching innovations
I changed the way I teach this class in the Fall of 2005 to include more instruction (albeit self-guided) in software programs since students had requested such instruction in this class the last time I taught it. (Students request direct instruction in software in most all of their professional writing classes because they believe that is what the class is about. They learn fairly quickly in most classes that professional writing is more about rhetoric, design, usability, etc., than having an instructor step them through a particular software program.)
To accommodate their desires, however, I created approximately twenty tutorials that would help them learn programs such as those in Microsoft Office Suite, Macromedia Suite, Adobe Creative Suite, and also other programs including WS_FTP and CD-burning software, all of which they will use at some point in their professional writing courses and employment. These tutorials give basic instructions on how to create a product in that particular program (and for what purpose). I constructed these tutorials so that the product students create directly ties in to the parts of their web portfolio they will need to construct during their time in the 3410 class.
For example, they complete a set of tutorials on Adobe ImageReady and Macromedia Fireworks in which they learn how to slice a large image/web-interface (created in a previous tutorial) and add a pop-up navigational menu to one (or multiple) slice(s) of the interface. Typically (in 2004/5) students would implement the slicing and pop-up menu techniques for their web portfolio. In addition, students are required to write a contextualizing introduction (required in the Reflective Letter portion of the portfolio assignment) to each finished product, which doubles as an introduction to the artifact in their final web portfolio should they choose to use it.
narrative evaluations
- “Cheryl tried to help each person individually in class and tried to make time for each student.”
- Cheryl was “easy to talk to and learn from” and had “good enthusiasm for the course content.”
- “I really liked how enthusiastic Cheryl is about her job. She really cares about the students and wants them to do well.”
- “She responds well to the needs of her students.”
- “I feel like everything Cheryl presented to us was relevant. I’ve learned so many new things that are going to be especially helpful when I graduate. She is an excellent teacher! I feel like she has been one of the best new additions to this department.”
- “Great class, Cheryl! One of my best this semester. I really liked the one-on-one attention that I (and others) got. It helped the students to help each other toward the end of the portfolio construction. I liked the personal, active interaction with you.”
- “I feel like I am walking out of this class with a tremendous amount of knowledge and skills. I learned so much in this class, and that knowledge will be a great foundation for the rest of my classes.”
- “Cheryl is an excellent teacher! Her teaching theories (praxis) are some of the best I’ve seen.”
- “We didn’t just learn how to make a website, we learned good design and how we want to present ourselves to exmployers.”
accompanying materials
see also
Tags: new prep, SoTL, teaching challenge, undergraduate
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Thursday, October 19th, 2006
This is a special-topics seminar for masters students in the Literature and Writing program and for PhD students in the Theory and Practice of Professional Communication program. I taught two very different iterations of this course: Fall 2006 and Summer 2006.
FALL 2006 summary
I was asked last spring to prep for this new course, which was easy considering this is my dream syllabus. My focus is on multimodal composition pedagogies. The readings and assignments of this onsite class focus on composition pedagogies from the last 20-ish years. Assignments include reviewing journals in the field, writing an academic paper, and producing a multimodal project, along with reading an average of 200 pages of theory each week. We also cover professional development in the field.
- sections taught in department this term: 1
- number of students enrolled: 5 masters and 3 PhD students
teaching innovations
The first innovation was an in-class assignment that we worked on throughout the semester. This assignment includes having students map out their understandings of the readings (in relation to composition pedagogies) on the wall of our classroom. We constructed a large board on which students posted index cards filled with major and minor theories, themes, important authors and articles, and other useful information, all of which helped them to visually conceive of the scope of composition studies as an academic field.
The second innovation was the inclusion of professional development discussions that enhance the students knowledge about becoming an academic, joining the field of writing studies (as many of them would, in some form), and demystifying that process. The PhD program was new at the time and so these discussions were built on informal questions about the academic job market at the beginning of class. I was happy to provide a setting for these discussions since it relates to my professional mentoring work at national conferences.
narrative evaluations
accompanying materials
- Fall 2006 syllabus [doc]
- photograph of the student-produced ‘map’ of composition pedagogies
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SUMMER 2006 summary
I taught an online summer course for masters students, focused on Teaching Writing with Technology. When I offered this course, it had a different course number (basically as a special topics) but USU has reconfigured their course catalog since 2007 and now that course number no longer exists (6/7480 is the next closest). I taught this version of 6480 as a reading group where students were invited to choose a list of 5 books in the field of digital writing studies, according to their particular interests, read a book a week, write a formal book review about it, and post that review (along with responses to and discussions about each others’ selections) on an online discussion forum. This class helped me enact a happenings pedagogy through open assignments (i.e., allowing each student to choose, and negotiate with me, their book lists).
narrative evaluations
- student evaluations were not available for summer, online classes at the time
accompanying materials
Tags: doctoral, graduate, masters, new course, new prep
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Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
This online course is a requirement in the online masters program in technical communication at Utah State University. It focuses on teaching students how to edit documents with consideration to audience and context, including readability and accessibility issues. I taught two sections of this course, with two different preps: Spring 2006 and Summer 2007.
SPRING 2006 summary
This was the first time I taught Editing, and also the first time I taught in our online-only, practitioners-based MA program. (There were no doctoral students enrolled this term.)
- sections taught in department this term: 1
- number of students enrolled: 13
- numeric evaluations (none available)
teaching innovations
I introduced students to the procedures of editing scholarly, digital texts, and we used webtexts from the journal I edit, Kairos, as the major project. In groups of four, students collaboratively edited one webtext (including written content and website design) from developmental stages to the text’s final copy-editing and proofreading. In addition, they wrote introductions for their webtext, the themes of which were focused on the history and future of the journal. None of these students lived in the same area and so all group work had to be completed using online communication.
Another innovation was my use of an offsite FTP location where students could upload and view their in-progress websites. (USU doesn’t offer this ability to students, and so I used other resources at my disposal to accommodate learning.) Because of the theoretical and technical expertise students had to learn to complete the major assignment, I learned how to write more detailed assignment sequences. I also learned to organize my online teaching better using a content management system so that students can more easily find the information they need.
teaching challenge
The class progressed fairly well, with the exception of one problematic student group who had difficulty communicating and collaborating in the online environment. I ended up moderating their discussions, and group work progressed smoothly after that. From this experience, I learned how to react in appropriate ways to inappropriate online communication from adult learners.
narrative evaluations
accompanying materials
SUMMER 2007 summary
This was the second time I taught this online-only class to graduate students at Utah State University. I changed the syllabus, since the summer course was only six weeks long (as opposed to the 15-week semesters), and we focused on the rhetorical and aesthetic situations of editing different media. We “progressed” through levels of editing (developmental, copy-editing, proofreading, etc.) on written texts whose layouts had yet to be completed (i.e., an unformatted article), to visual texts such as poems, to audio-only texts such as radio commercials, to multimodal texts such as websites with graphics and videos. This course proceeded much more smoothly than the previous iteration did, in part because I was more comfortable teaching online and in part because I had earned the trust of many onsite graduate students in the Literature & Writing program who enrolled in this online course because it was my last class at Utah State.
evaluations
- These were lost in a database crash. (I can provide an email from the college systems administrator attesting to this.)
accompanying materials
- Summer 2007 syllabus (to come)
Tags: graduate, masters, new prep, online, teaching challenge
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Sunday, October 15th, 2006
This course, targeted at masters students in the Literature and Writing program, is a graduate-level special topics class.
Fall 2005 semester summary
I was asked to teach this online class—my first online teaching experience—so that distance students in the now-defunct online Literature & Writing program could finish their coursework. I focused on literary hypertext and aesthetic new media texts. Students read theory about and produced several genres of digital literary texts. The course was taught completely at a distance through Syllabase (USU’s own CMS), primarily using discussion forums.
Although it was a new prep in a new medium of delivery for me, overall I believe the course went well despite a rocky start regarding my trying to understand differing time management and assignment issues in an online learning space. The students enrolled in this class included those in the Literature and Writing, Online Technical Communication, American Studies, and Theory and Practice of Professional Communication graduate degrees. Each strand of our graduate program is represented because the class fulfills requirements in each while crossing interdisciplinary boundaries, depending on the topic. This class’s focus on literary hypertext and new media texts crosses academic boundaries, bringing together the tech comm and literature students, for instance, into some insightful discussions from different viewpoints.
- sections taught in department this term: 1
- number of students enrolled: 13
teaching innovations
This was the first online class I taught. It is also the first graduate class for which I have been the instructor of record, and it was a new prep for me. Although it got off to a rocky start because of my inexperience teaching solely online, it matured into a class and a medium I enjoy.
The main innovation I feel I have introduced to this special topics class is that of having students produce complicated new media texts at a distance. Learning to troubleshoot technological (as well as pedagogical) issues from a distance has helped me to rethink how I teach the same information in face-to-face classes like Professional Writing Technologies (3410) and to not take that knowledge for granted. Several final projects from this course have been featured in conference presentations and articles I have published.
narrative and numeric evaluations
Because Fall 2005 was the first semester that online evaluation forms were made available to distance students, only one student participated in filling a form out. Continuing Education, the department which oversees online course evaluations, mislabeled which class this evaluation was from (attaching it to an onsite, undergraduate course from the same semester). Thus, I do not have reliable evaluation data to show from this course.
accompanying materials
see also
Tags: graduate, new prep, online, SoTL
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